The Moz Q&A Community

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?

We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits.

I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf

In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well.

My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to:

convert the pdf to a webpage.

Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage

Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to.

This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL?

3 Responses

"My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point"

You do? I sure don't. That sounds ridiculous to me and I see absolutely no reason why this should ever be necessary. I'd be surprised if anyone else did.

Your original plan was the right one; move that pdf to your main domain in a pdf folder or whatever and redirect the original URL right to it. That's the way to go, for sure. If you want to build it as an HTML page that's fine too. I personally would do that if it were an option mainly because I can't stand PDFs. But that's me.

No reason you need to have pdf, css, and images in a subdomain. That's silly.

Our site is an ecommerce one, and every product page is supported with a pdf. This is expected from our customers and it basically is the product page in a PDF format with tweaks. We have 10,000s of these and for speed, we store files such as pdfs and images locally in a subdomain.

For content delivery network purposes, I heard it was better to keep pdfs, images separate as well? We haven't got a CDN but it's something we will look into next year.

Do you recommend scrapping the subdomain in such an instance and hosting them all in the main domain in a folder? Would that impact on page load and speed?

Also is it possible to redirect individual subdomain URLs to a main domain one?

"Do you recommend scrapping the subdomain in such an instance and hosting them all in the main domain in a folder?"

Yes.

"Would that impact on page load and speed?"

No.

This PDF is a perfect example of why not to do this, but the same can be said for images. Say you create an awesome infographic that people start linking to/sharing, and it's sitting on your subdomain. There goes your SEO benefit, much like you're experiencing with this PDF.

If you have the right hosting service, none of this should impact performance. Looking into a CDN will help for sure. I've heard good things about cloud flare, for example.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.